“Geeks Who Drink” a Denver-originated pub trivia game, will bow as a weekly TV game show on SyFy, premiering July 16. Zachary Levi (“Chuck” and the upcoming “Heroes Reborn”) will serve as executive producer and host. And yes, he’ll drink.

The game’s founders have regularly offered nights devoted to hit TV series, including “Arrested Development,” “Breaking Bad” and “Game of Thrones.” Now the game becomes a TV series itself.
The production, from Levi’s The Nerd Machine, is expected to get a promotional boost at ComiCon a week ahead of the debut.

The drink-fueled trivia game boasts more than 25,000 people participating in over 600 bars across 35 states. The TV adaptation will work this way, says a SyFy release: “two teams of self-proclaimed “trivia geeks” battle it out in rapid-fire quizzes that cover topics from pop culture to science fiction. Each team consists of three players – a celebrity team captain and two trivia pros. After three rounds of raucous game-play and (mostly) friendly competition, the winning team will earn bragging rights, a spot on the Geeks Who Drink leaderboard and a bevy of prizes to geek out over.”

The webseries about a Brooklyn pot dealer is created and written by the married duo of Katja Blichfeld (Emmy-winning casting director of “30 Rock”) and Ben Sinclair (“Sisters” and “Big C”), and executive produced by Katja Blichfeld, Russell Gregory and Ben Sinclair.

The series stars Ben Sinclair as “The Guy,” a friendly pot dealer whose clients include an eccentric group of characters.

HBO will make the previous 19 episodes, originally on Vimeo, available later this year.

“High Maintenance” joins a growing number of webseries to make the jump to TV, among them “Broad City,” “Web Therapy” and “Children’s Hospital.”

Sunday’s episode of “Mad Men” titled “The Forecast” was intended to be bizarre, with stilted dialog between uncomfortable characters. On the surface, it was about Don’s assignment to write a speech about the future of the company. The forecast is for change: what we saw was a stressful collision of eras and cultures as the Sixties gives way to the Seventies.

Glen Bishop hitting on older, married former neighbor Betty (Draper) Francis conveyed the awkwardness of the Vietnam-era creeping up on the “Father Knows Best” era. And it was creepy. Why bring back a minor character with only four episodes left in the series? Besides a curtain call for the writer’s son Marten Weiner, it illustrated the excruciating passage of time and widening gap between generations.

The young, pregnant couple buying the empty Don Draper bachelor pad telegraphed another kind of moving on, as a hopeful younger generation finds a beginning in the ashes of Don’s pathetic losses. “The emptiness is a problem,” the real estate agent told Don, speaking of staging the apartment but unintentionally noting the trouble at his core.

Joan continues to hold fast to her self-respect and family values; “I need to work,” she declared to her suitor (Bruce Greenwood). She may end up with a greater sense of accomplishment than anyone besides Peggy. Again it’s those women who have the most vivid desires for the future: Peggy wants fame and great success in advertising, and “to create something lasting.”

As his “Mad Men” run draws to a close, in part 2 of season 7, “End of an Era,” writer-creator Matthew Weiner reminds us, through Don, that, “There’s less to actually do, but more to think about.” It’s a quiet reverberation that should stay with us through the week, until the fourth-to-last episode, “Time & Life.”

Joanne Ostrow has been watching TV since before "reality" required quotation marks. "Hill Street Blues" was life-changing. If Dickens, Twain or Agatha Christie were alive today, they'd be writing for television. And proud of it.